(The above image displays a surveillance software identifying customers' patterns at a department store in Beijing. Reuters: Thomas Peter)
Chinaâs Social Credits System â
Various pilot projects have been launched throughout China ahead of 2020
Chinese authorities use new advanced technologies to crackdown on crime
Beijing could engineer society if it combines technology with its credit system
Suzhou:
As the national system is still being fully realised, dozens of pilot social credit systems have already been tested by local governments at provincial and city levels. For example, Suzhou, a city in eastern China, uses a point system where every resident is rated on a scale between 0 and 200 points â every resident starts from the baseline of 100 points.One can earn bonus points for benevolent acts and lose points for disobeying laws, regulations, and social norms. According to a 2016 report by local police, the top-rated Suzhou citizen had 134 points for donating more than one litre of blood and doing more than 500 hours of volunteer work.
Xiamen:Â
The development of a local social credit system in the city of Xiamen started as early as 2004, authorities reportedly automatically apply messages to the mobile phone lines of blacklisted citizens.
"The person you're calling is dishonest," whoever calls a lowly-rated person will be told before the call is put through.
Group: @chelineyuâ @stevenyang226â
Point System
This is the hypothetical point system we roughly came up with during one of our group meetings, that outlines the reincarnation forms, and the âcriteriaâ of the addition and deduction of points.Â
 Weekly Course Topic Focus â Value: to (hypothetically) âevaluateâ the value of a personâs lifeÂ
Inspiration:
Chinaâs social credits system (research by Rogier Creemers)
ABC Article
Beijing ambitiously attempts to create a Social Credit System (SCS) by 2020 â that is, a proposed national system designed to value and engineer better individual behaviour by establishing the scores of 1.4 billion citizens and "awarding the trustworthy" and "punishing the disobedient".
æäșșäžćœćé äžçŽæ”źć± ïŒ"saving one life is better than building a seven tier pagoda"
The 6 Realms of Desire (the realms in which Buddhists believe each person will be rebirthed into)
Brief Concept:
Each person has a differing lifespan, for some it may be 80 years, others 90, but death is equal for everyone. Gilgul is the Hebrew word which translates into the transmigration or reincarnation of souls; where souls are seen to "cycle" through "lives" or "incarnations", being attached to different human bodies over time. Which body they associate with depends on their particular tasks in the physical world, spiritual levels of the bodies of predecessors and so on.
Your value of life will be reflected in your next life, because of a special department which can count how many benefactions and rascalities you committed in your last life. Â According to the final marks, you will âgilgulâ onto another âlifeâ such as an animal, insect or human. The benefactions will increase points, but rascalities will deduct points.
We came up with the idea of designing an evaluation on a personâs lifespan, and according to his/her behaviour and morality measurements, we created a system - keep track on a personâs scores of his life, and it determines what this person can be in his next life.Â
Inspiration:Â Rogier Creemersâs research on social credits system in China that is created for managing social orders.
Contemporary art and design often looks at the idea of constructed binaries, such as man/woman, straight/gay, dirty/clean, organic/synthetic. Considering the history of these âpairsâ, how can art and design interrogate these binaries and offer new insights?
For Assessment 2, I was pretty unsure about how to take my Assessment 1 Poster based on the binary of the modern working woman and the housewife, further, so I went on to brainstorm a couple of other binaries in which I was interested in. Some of these included the binaries of light and dark, childhood and adulthood, the organic and synthetic. The binary I ended up exploring was the balance between the growth and decay of nature and the human population â the material side of this assessment was inspired by the ironic act of picking flowers in order to preserve them (although they were already in a stage of decay once disconnected from the original plant). We own a cherry blossom tree in our front yard which is usually in full bloom late August/early September, but it soon starts to lose its flowers mid September (right about this time). Being born in September, the blooming period of the cherry blossoms has always been a special sight for me, ever since I was younger as well, so the desire to preserve these flowers were the starting point of this assignment.
My first experiment began with shooting some random clips of foliage around the Paddington campus with a grainy, vintage film filter. At this point, I wasnât sure where I was going to take this assignment but it was an interesting experience editing the clips on Adobe Premiere as I havenât spent too much time on video editing for assignments in the past. I messed around with some distortion effects and masked them into the centre to create the effect of looking through a lens, but wasnât too sure how to take this idea further.
My next experiment was based off the idea of trying to preserve the colour and form of the flowers, inspired by Makotaâs Ice Flowers, I clipped a few blossoms from our tree outside and put them in a plastic bag with some water, and froze it overnight. The end product was visually quite pretty, and the flowers seemed to have maintain their form and colour â they looked rather fresh in the ice. After thawing them out for a bit and managing to get some flowers out of the ice, they came out bruised and frail (with a bit of browning on the petals). For my second experiment, I attempted to burn the blossoms after seeing images of burning roses while doing my research on artists using flowers in their material practice. This experiment failed as there was still too much moisture in the flowers, and the blossoms only burned for a fraction of a second before the flame went out.
After both trying to preserve and destroy the blossoms and looking back at the results of the previous experiments, I decided to put the flowers through a scanner. I figured that capturing an image of the picked blossoms would be the most long-lasting form of âpreservationâ I could do for this assessment. Scanning the flowers, instead of taking photos of them, produced high quality images which also captured more depth and tonal values â I preferred the scanned images of the flowers over taking photos with my phone. I also scanned the partially thawed block of ice and flowers, which turned out quite visually intriguing, having solid and liquid forms being scanned into an image.
My final body of work consists of 6 scanned images, mimicking modern still life assemblages but also feeling like a messy collage of some sort. They are a photographic series of clipped cherry blossoms, the accumulation of household items and everyday necessities; cling wrap, car keys, pens, jewellery, etc. The images become more cluttered as they progress, taking away from the beauty of the blossoms themselves. In the attempts to preserve our natural environment, thereâs also only so much we can do when we also want to accomodate the growth of the human population. My body of work aims to raise questions around this issue; where we kill off (the flowers) but aim to preserve them, almost like how we kill off nature in order to âpreserveâ humanity â to sustain the human population growth. Where do we draw the line in the balance between preserving nature and accomodating rapid urbanisation? We need our natural environment but we also feel the need to accumulate the things that help us live comfortably.
The United States makes up less than 5 percent of the population on earth, yet we easily consume over 30 percent of its resources. While us humans would appear to be doing well, spreading our population like wild fire across the globe, the diminishing resources and other life forms on the planet tell a different story.
Billions of plastic bags are made each year. Of these bags, one hundred billion are thrown away according to Worldwatch Institute, with less than 1 percent finding their way into a recycle bin. The end result of this is around 1 billion birds and mammals dying each year by the ingestion of plastic.
Andean glaciers, which provide vital water resources for millions of people, are shrinking and an increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events are affecting economies, the report notes.
The contamination of water sources by human and industrial waste, including pharmaceutical and personal care products, is a major problem in the region, the GEO-6 reports state. It is estimated that about 30 per cent of the population uses drinking water contaminated by human feces.
Indoor air pollution is responsible for 600,000 premature deaths every year in Africa. The continentâs reliance on the use of biomass for cooking, lighting and heating means that 90 per cent of the regionâs population is exposed to this health threat.
The first image is a scan of the flowers with the top panel of the scanner closed, which has pressed the flowers against the platen glass. The second photo was captured with the top panel of the scanner open, which has allowed the flowers to retain their shape and also created interesting shading. I adjusted the exposure and saturation on Photoshop in order to have a black background (without any unnecessary shadows and light coming through in the scan, caused by the unclosed top panel).Â
Klimas has caused their explosion by shooting them with steel balls. The photographs capture what happens in just a seventh of a second in time. But whatâs important is the contrasting effect that remains. While the top half of the photograph features a still and serene beautiful flower, the bottom half has become utter chaos. What once was as calm as the top half is now an explosion of energy and a destruction of harmony.
In opposition to the second experiment, I saw a couple of images of burning roses while searching for inspiration for my body of work and went in to experiment with the picked cherry blossoms. They would burn for the slightest bit and the fire would go out quickly as the flowers were still lush and had some moisture in them.Â
A series of sculptures designed so that viewers can observe "the changing life of flowers that are locked in ice," â a juxtaposition of organic and artificial forms that "change themselves over time in the ruins far from humanâs existence."
We have a small cherry blossom tree in our front yard thatâs usually in full bloom in early September, and then it slowly starts to lose the flowers mid-month. In attempt to âpreserveâ the flowers, I put them in a plastic bag, filled it with water and put it in the freezer. In the following experiments, Iâll be looking further into the preservation and decay of natural elements; at this stage, Iâm still trying to figure out how to convey the binary of growth and decay.
After thawing out the flowers, the petals and more delicate areas were bruised and frail â a failure in preservation attempts? They looked okay while they were still frozen in the ice though.Â
Experiment 1 â Playing around with Foliage Footage
I managed to get a bit of footage here and there of some greenery I saw while walking around campus, I put it into Adobe Premiere Pro and messed around with distortion and masking the effects into a circular section in the centre. Wasnât exactly sure what I was trying to achieve in the end, but I was pretty intrigued with how it turned out â I hadnât focused on video for an assessment before, so that might be an option for the final work.Â
Contemporary art and design often looks at the idea of constructed binaries, such as man/woman, straight/gay, dirty/clean, organic/synthetic. Considering the history of these âpairsâ, how can art and design interrogate these binaries and offer new insights?
For Assessment 2, I will be continuing my research on binaries, however digging deeper into the binary of growth and decay â the wavering balance between the growth of the human population, and the subsequent decay of nature.Â
Some brainstormed ideas â
- Experimenting with flowers
- The act of picking flowers, then trying to preserve themÂ
- Salvaging something that has been killed offÂ
- Romantic undertonesÂ
- The balance of growth and decay in society
- Urbanisation, deforestation vs. population growth and technology
- Where is the line?
- Edit preserved flowers to look like something else?Â
We started by having a conversation about what is the ânowâ and the physical representations of it. We discussed analogue and digital technology and how simple gestures of asking âWhat the time isâ directed us to make this video.Â
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